Forever. Part 3

The living room wasn't empty after all.

Out of the reach of the light, a wolf lay next to the couch, twitching and jerking, mouth parted, revealing its teeth. I recognized the color of the coat, the staring green eyes: Cole.

Shifting. I knew, logically, that he must be shifting - whether from wolf into human or human into wolf, I didn't know - but still, I felt uneasy. I watched for a minute, waiting to see if I would have to open the door to release him outside.

The pounding music fell into silence as the song ended; I still heard ghostly echoes of the beat whispering in my ears. I dropped my supplies softly onto the couch beside me, the hairs on the back of my neck p.r.i.c.kling to wary attention. By the other couch, the wolf was still spasming, head jerking to the side again and again, senselessly violent and mechanical. His legs were ramrod straight away from him. Saliva dripped from his open jaws.

This wasn't shifting. This was a seizure.

I started with surprise as a slow piano chord rang out beside my ear, but it was only the next track on the CD.

I crept around the couch to kneel by Cole's body. A pair of pants lay on the carpet beside him, and a few inches away from them, a half-depressed syringe.

"Cole," I breathed, "what have you done to yourself?"

The wolf's head jerked back toward its shoulders, again and again.

Cole sang from the speakers, his voice slow and uncertain against a spa.r.s.e backing of just piano, a different Cole than I'd ever heard: If I am Hannibal.

where are my Alps?

I had no one to call. I couldn't call 911. Beck was far out of reach. It would take too long to try to explain to Karyn, my boss at the bookstore, even if I could trust her to keep our secret. Grace might know what to do, but even she was in the woods, hidden from me. The feeling of impending loss sharpened inside me, like my lungs rubbed sandpaper with each inhalation.

Cole's body ripped through one spasm after another, head snapping back again and again. There was something deeply disturbing about the silence of it, the fact that the only sound accompanying all this abrupt motion was the hiss of his head rubbing the carpet while a voice he no longer possessed sang from the speakers.

I fumbled in my back pocket and pulled out my phone. There was only one person to call. I stabbed in the number.

"Romulus," Isabel said, after only two rings. I heard road noise. "I was thinking of calling you."

"Isabel," I said. I couldn't make my voice sound serious enough for some reason. It just sounded as if I were talking about the weather. "I think Cole's having a seizure. I don't know what to do."

She didn't even hesitate. "Roll him on his side so he doesn't drown in his own spit."

"He's a wolf."

In front of me, Cole was still seizing, at war with himself. Flecks of blood had appeared in his saliva. I thought he'd bitten his tongue.

"Of course he is," she said. She sounded p.i.s.sed, which I was beginning to realize meant that she actually cared. "Where are you?"

"In the house."

"Well then, I'll see you in a second."

"You -?"

"I told you," Isabel said. "I was thinking of calling you."

It only took two minutes for her SUV to pull into the driveway.

Twenty seconds later, I realized Cole wasn't breathing.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

* SAM *

Isabel was on the phone when she came into the living room. She threw her purse on the couch, barely looking at me and Cole. To the phone, she said, "Like I said, my dog is having a seizure. I don't have a car. What can I do for him here? No, this isn't for Chloe."

As she listened to their answer, she looked at me. For a moment, we both stared at each other. It had been two months and Isabel had changed - her hair, too, was longer, but like me, the difference was in her eyes. She was a stranger. I wondered if she thought the same thing about me.

On the phone, they'd asked her a question. She relayed it to me. "How long has it been?"

I looked away, to my watch. My hands felt cold. "Uh - six minutes since I found him. He's not breathing."

Isabel licked her bubblegum-colored lips. She looked past me to where Cole still jerked, his chest still, a reanimated corpse. When she saw the syringe beside him, her eyes shuttered. She held the phone away from her mouth. "They say to try an ice pack. In the small of his back."

I retrieved two bags of frozen french fries from the freezer. By the time I returned, Isabel was off her phone and crouching in front of Cole, a precarious pose in her stacked heels. There was something striking about her posture; something about the tilt to her head. She was like a beautiful and lonely piece of art, lovely but unreachable.

I knelt on the other side of Cole and pressed the bags behind his shoulder blades, feeling vaguely impotent. I was battling death and these were all the weapons I had.

"Now," Isabel said, "with thirty percent less sodium."

It took me a moment to realize that she was reading the side of the bag of french fries.

Cole's voice came out of the speakers near us, s.e.xy and sarcastic: "I am expendable."

"What was he doing?" she asked. She didn't look at the syringe.

"I don't know," I said. "I wasn't here."

Isabel reached out to help steady one of the bags. "Dumb s.h.i.t."

I became aware that the shaking had slowed.

"It's stopping," I said. Then, because I felt like being too optimistic would somehow tempt fate into punishing me: "Or he's dead."

"He's not dead," Isabel said. But she didn't sound certain.

The wolf was still, head lolled back at a grotesque angle. My fingers were bright red from the cold of the frozen fries. We were totally silent. By now, Grace would be far away from where she had called from. It seemed like a silly plan, now, no more logical than saving Cole's life with a bag of french fries.

The wolf's chest stayed motionless; I didn't know how long it had been since he'd taken a breath.

"Well," I said, quietly. "d.a.m.n."

Isabel fisted her hands in her lap.

Suddenly the wolf's body bucked again in another violent movement. His legs scissored and flailed.

"The ice," Isabel snapped. "Sam, wake up!"

But I didn't move. I was surprised by the ferocity of my relief as Cole's body buckled and twitched. This new pain I recognized - shifting. The wolf jerked and twitched and fur somehow sloughed and rolled back. Paws peeled into fingers, shoulders rippled and widened, the spine buckled. Everything shaking. The wolf's body stretched impossibly, muscles bulging against skin, bones audibly sc.r.a.ping one another.

And then it was Cole, gasping, his lips tinged blue, his fingers jerking and reaching for air. I could still see his skin stretching and remaking itself along his ribs with each shuddering breath. His green eyes were half-lidded, each blink almost too long to be a blink.

I heard Isabel suck in her breath and I realized that I should have warned her to look away. I put my hand on her arm. She flinched.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm fine," she replied, too fast to mean it. No one was fine after they saw that.

The next song on the CD started, and when the drums pattered an opening, one of NARKOTIKA's best-known songs, Cole laughed, silently, a laugh that saw no humor in anything, ever.

Isabel stood up, suddenly ferocious, like the laugh had been a slap.

"My work here's done. I'm going to go."

Cole's hand reached out and curled around her ankle. His voice was slurred. "IshbelCulprepr." He closed his eyes; opened them again. They were slits. "Youknow what-do." He paused. "Affer the beep. Beep."

I looked at Isabel. Victor's hands pounded posthumously on the drums in the background.

She told Cole, "Next time, kill yourself outside. Less cleanup for Sam."

"Isabel," I said sharply.

But Cole seemed unaffected.

"Was just," he said, and stopped. His lips were less blue now that he'd been breathing for a while. "Was just trying to find ..." He stopped entirely and closed his eyes. A muscle was still twitching over his shoulder blade.

Isabel stepped over his body and s.n.a.t.c.hed up her purse from the couch. She stared at the banana I'd left there beside it, eyebrows pulled down low over her eyes as if, out of everything that she'd seen today, the banana was the most inexplicable.

The idea of being alone in the house with Cole - with Cole, like this - was unbearable.

"Isabel," I said. I hesitated. "You don't have to go."

She looked back at Cole, and her mouth became a thin, hard thing. There was something wet caught in her long lashes. She said, "Sorry, Sam."

When she left, she shut the back door hard enough to make every gla.s.s Cole had left on the counter rattle.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

* ISABEL *

As long as I kept the speedometer needle above sixty-five, all I saw was the road.

The narrow roads around Mercy Falls all looked the same after dark. Big trees, then small trees, then cows, then big trees, then small trees, then cows. Rinse and repeat. I threw my SUV around corners with crumbling edges and hurtled down identical straightaways. I went around one turn fast enough that my empty coffee cup flew out of the cup holder. The cup pattered against the pa.s.senger side door and then rolled around in the footwell as I tore around another turn. It still didn't feel fast enough.

What I wanted was to drive faster than the question: What if you'd stayed?

I'd never had a speeding ticket. Having a hotshot lawyer father with anger-management issues was a fantastic deterrent; usually just imagining his face when he heard the news kept me safely under the limit. Plus, out here, there wasn't really any point to speeding. It was Mercy Falls, population: 8. If you drove too fast, you'd find yourself through Mercy Falls and out the other side.

But right now, a screaming match with a cop felt just about right for my current state of mind.

I didn't head toward home. I already knew that I could get home in twenty-two minutes from where I was. Not long enough.

The problem was that he was under my skin now. I'd gotten close to him again and I'd caught Cole. He came with a very specific set of symptoms. Irritability. Mood swings. Shortness of breath. Loss of appet.i.te. Listless, gla.s.sy eyes. Fatigue. Next up, pustules and buboes, like the plague. Then, death.

I'd really thought I'd recovered. But it turned out I was just in remission.

It wasn't just Cole. I hadn't actually told Sam about my father and Marshall. I tried to convince myself that my father couldn't get the protection lifted from the wolves. Not even with the congressman. They were both big shots in their hometowns, but that was different from being a big shot in Minnesota. I didn't have to feel guilty about not warning Sam tonight.

I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn't realize my rearview mirror was full of flashing red and blue lights. The siren wailed. Not a long one, just a brief howl to let me know he was there.

Suddenly a screaming match with a cop didn't feel like such a brilliant idea.

I pulled over. Got my license out of my purse. Registration from the glove box. Rolled down the window.

When the cop came to my window, I saw that he wore a brown uniform and the big weird-looking hat that meant he was a state trooper, not a county cop. State cops never gave warnings.

I was so screwed.

He shone a flashlight at me. I winced and turned on the interior light of the car so he'd turn it off.

"Good evening, miss. License and registration, please." He looked a little p.i.s.sed. "Did you know I was following you?"

"Well, obviously," I said. I gestured to the gearshift, put it into park.

The trooper smiled the unfunny smile my father did sometimes when he was on the phone. He took my license and the registration without looking at them. "I was behind you for a mile and a half before you stopped."

"I was distracted," I said.